CategoryHow to

How to calculate your Bitcoin gains and taxes with Luno

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This is a work in progress. Please send me feedback if you have any questions, updates or spot any mistakes. I’ll update this and the demo spreadsheet as things evolve. Odds are that if you’re an early Bitcoin adopter – tinkering, investing or otherwise getting involved in the industry, anytime before October 2017 – your digital tokens have probably increased quite a bit in value. And, unless you...

How to improve your online privacy

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My views on online privacy have evolved a lot in recent years. This is partly because I better understand why privacy is valuable, why it’s important to pay for online media and services, and because of all the recent cases of abuse of our online data by the big online platforms. My reasons to value my privacy might be different from yours, but I’d encourage you to do some reading (and thinking)...

How to sell Bitcoin Cash (BCC or BCH)

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I recently wrote two articles; one outlining the background to the scaling debate and recent near-forks, the other about Bitcoin Cash and how Luno will (and won’t) support it. Update: you can now instantly sell your Bitcoin Cash on Luno, without the need to send it to another platform. Information further down. In a nutshell: forking a digital currency is taking the rules of the current...

How to get your credit report in South Africa

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tl;dr: I recommend these guys. In the same way that countries are rated by their creditworthiness –how likely they are to pay back their debt and the rate of interest they need to pay– individuals also have a score which serves as a financial résumé of sorts. In this article, I’ll discuss what your credit score is and how to get a credit report in South Africa. What is a credit...

Bitcoin to rand – price calculator and chart

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The price of Bitcoin is measured in a currency like US Dollar (USD) or South African rand (ZAR) . Here’s a quick Bitcoin to rand price calculator and graph. This price is set on Bitcoin exchanges all over the world by consumers buying and selling it. Since each Bitcoin exchange operates independently, the market of buyers and sellers will set the price independently on that exchange. In its...

How to buy international stocks from South Africa

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Update: I once wrote about eToro as an investing platform, available to South Africans. This is no longer the case, nor my recommendation and I have updated this article. If this is the start of your investing journey, you’d be wise to spend a few hours to brush up on the basics. It’s not difficult (what some in the industry will want you to believe) and you can absolutely do it by...

Removing malware from first line of WordPress PHP pages

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Kudos to Carel van Wyk, for helping out with this one. I’m releasing it into the wild here to help other people who might have the same problem. The problem There are bots trying to gain access to websites, email and social media accounts, all the time. Don’t take it personally; they’re simply looking for (usually known) weaknesses to exploit and then once they’re in, they use your account to...

How to make an international transfer with TransferWise

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Having made my fair share of international transfers, I was mildly blown away by the speed and simplicity of TransferWise. For this very type of transaction, it blows banks, Paypal and yes (with the limited liquidity in markets) Bitcoin out of the water and is part of the reason I’m convinced Bitcoin isn’t a viable solution for remittances yet. I decided to take step-by-step screen...

Separate your transactional and marketing emails

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Companies send out two very distinct, very different types of emails (or at least, they should). Transactional (or business) emails relate to the specific individual: welcome emails, invoices for payment, lost password requests, scheduled system downtime and the like. Marketing (or newsletter) emails relate to things that the individual might find interesting such as new features, opinion...

Code Corps (dot org) is in beta!

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Note: I was approached by volunteers for the Bernie Sanders 2016 US presidential campaign who now run the Code Corps project. I am not affiliated or involved with CodeCorps anymore. So, I decided to start a charitable enterprise. The idea is to provide free coding and design lessons (both in person and online). Ladies and gentlemen, I present: Code Corps. The financial aim is to make money (by...

About me

Werner van Rooyen

Formerly Business Development and Marketing at Luno (where we went from eight nerds in a tiny office to hundreds of people spread over three continents) and before that Marketing at PayFast. Currently a full-time nomad, learning, running long distances and doing research, mostly in Mexico.